I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the passing of Pope Francis, today, Easter Monday, 7:35a, local time in Rome. It can be said that, like Queen Elizabeth, he worked until he died. Good for him. On Easter Sunday he gave the “Urbi et Orbi” blessing to the “City [of Rome] and to the World” while an aide read his address. He later greeted cheering crowds in St. Peter’s Square from the popemobile.
He was 88, assuming the office of Pope at age 76. It’s hard to imagine. I’m 78, and it’s been years since I wanted to lead anything. I don’t mind working, but being in charge of an organization as large as the Roman Catholic Church at that age boggles the mind.
Because of who he was as a man and a Jesuit priest, he was often at odds with tradition and with the keepers of that tradition. Here are a few snippets from Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads by Chris Lowney. The book was written (and I read it) not long after he took office.
[He was trained by] the Jesuits, a religious order that forms leaders not by management courses but in a month-long silent retreat, by sending trainees off on an arduous pilgrimage, and by preparing recruits to counsel adults by having them teach young children.
He challenged “lukewarm Christians” and “couch potato” Christians to engage much more energetically in spreading the Church’s message, not to “take refuge . . . in a cozy life,” but to get beyond our “comfort zones” and live with greater “apostolic fervor.”
He challenged his Church to be more forthrightly “poor, and for the poor.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, reacting to the pope’s challenges, told an interviewer, “I find myself examining my own conscience . . . on style, on simplicity, on lots of things.”
“Your proper place is the frontier,” the cultural frontier, where they were “not to build walls but bridges” to those who did not share Catholic beliefs or culture. He told a group of devout Catholics that we should not “lock ourselves up in our parish, among our friends . . . with people who think as we do” but instead “The Church must step outside herself. To go where? To the outskirts of existence, whatever they may be.”
All the more stunning, then, that Pope Francis dispatched with tradition nearly a half-dozen times in his papacy’s first two hours: eschewing the red papal cape (the mozzetta); keeping his own simple pectoral cross instead of choosing from the more precious ones offered him; greeting the faithful in St. Peter’s Square with an informal “good evening” instead of more formal language; asking the crowd’s prayer for blessing before bestowing his own; and, at the end of it all, leaving the papal limo empty to join his fellow cardinals on the bus.
L’Osservatore Romano, the staid newspaper of record for Vatican watchers, called the performance “unprecedented and shocking.” Except it wasn’t a performance at all. We were not watching someone trying to act like a pope. We were watching a person unafraid to be who he was: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, called to serve as pope, not someone donning a costume to play a new role. In fact, if anything discomfited him at all, it seemed to be only the costuming, apparently a bit too regal to hang comfortably on his shoulders.
With Holy Week fresh on our minds, I’ll close the excerpts from Chris Lowney’s book with how Pope Francis handled Maundy Thursday:
Jesus bathed filthy, dust-covered feet that might have been flecked with traces of human or animal waste. That’s what Jesus did.
This iconic moment is commemorated in Christian churches on Holy Thursday, with selected parishioners standing in for the disciples and the parish priest for Jesus. The ritual typically unfolds like in the movies—that is, with no verisimilitude whatsoever. My brother was invited to have his foot washed when he was about ten years old, but my reverent Irish mother did the real washing, scrubbing away two or three epidermal layers, and, for good measure, dumping so much baby powder into my brother’s shoe that a fragrant mushroom cloud wafted over the altar when he yanked off the shoe.
The ritual is no less stylized when the pope enacts it at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, with select bishops or seminarians representing the apostles; I doubt any of them ever risked the career-ending gambit of presenting smelly feet to the pope.
But in 2013, Pope Francis recovered some of the shock value of Jesus’ original gesture. He forsook St. John Lateran’s gleaming marble floors for the drab stone flooring of the Casal del Marmo juvenile detention center, and he kissed the feet not of carefully chosen clerics and other Catholic worthies but of male and female juvenile delinquents who had been judged unworthy of walking the streets without close supervision.
There’s no shortage of news stories on the Pope’s passing and on his papacy. Some positive. Some negative. You can research and read those for yourself. I’ll just leave you with what Loyola Press shared this morning. A quote from Pope Francis himself:
Dear friends, if we walk in hope, allowing ourselves to be surprised by the new wine Jesus offers us, we have joy in our hearts, and we cannot fail to be witnesses of this joy. Christians are joyful; they are never gloomy. God is at our side…Jesus has shown us that the face of God is that of a loving Father. Sin and death have been defeated. Christians cannot be pessimists! They do not look like someone in constant mourning. If we are truly in love with Christ and if we sense how much he loves us, our heart will “light up” with a joy that spreads to everyone around us. —Excerpted from Embracing the Way of Jesus by Pope Francis
Joyful Pope Francis…
The Apostle Paul shared this joy:
And being confident of this, I know that I shall remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy of faith, that your rejoicing for me may be more abundant in Jesus Christ by my coming to you again. (Philippians 1.25, NKJV)